Taichung Inexperienced Museumbrary in central Taiwan, designed by SANAA Architects / Courtesy of Taichung Artwork Museum
TAICHUNG, Taiwan — “The structure is stuffed with insides and outsides. You’re always stepping out, then again in once more,” mentioned Korean artist Haegue Yang after strolling via the newly opened Taichung Artwork Museum, a part of Taichung Inexperienced Museumbrary in central Taiwan.
Right here, any try to attract a agency boundary between exterior and inside shortly loses which means, a reality written into the buildings’ facades.
Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese structure agency SANAA, the complicated includes eight cubic constructions of various sizes, every wrapped in a veil of metallic mesh that lets daylight and breeze seep via. As soon as inside, guests are invited to float alongside winding pathways, staircases, ramps and skybridges, transferring freely from one dice to the following.
Exterior view of Taichung Inexperienced Museumbrary, which includes eight cubic constructions of various sizes, every wrapped in a veil of metallic mesh. Courtesy of Taichung Artwork Museum
That blurring extends past kind to the constructing’s very operate. The complicated is, fairly boldly, each an artwork museum and a public library — a spot the place wanting and studying are intentionally entwined.
Taichung Inexperienced Museumbrary, constructed on a former navy airfield-turned-park, is broadly considered Taiwan’s most important cultural improvement of 2025. The mission marks the island’s newest effort to raise its worldwide profile within the arts.
Its location in Taichung, Taiwan’s second-largest metropolis, additionally nudges guests away from the capital of Taipei, which has lengthy been the island’s cultural middle and host of the Taipei Biennial. Situated roughly two hours from the capital by automotive or high-speed rail, Taichung is already house to establishments just like the Nationwide Taiwan Museum of Fantastic Arts and the Asia College Museum of Trendy Artwork.
The studying space of Taichung Public Library / Courtesy of Taichung Artwork Museum
“The Taichung Artwork Museum is the town’s first municipal museum. With this function, our focus is on the artwork histories of central Taiwan. On the identical time, we hope to deepen worldwide collaborations with establishments from all over the world,” mentioned Lai Yi-Hsin, the museum’s director.
That ambition — to pair “worldwide aptitude with the groundedness in locality,” as Yang put it — is already obvious within the establishment’s inaugural public fee, which invited Yang alongside Taiwanese artist Michael Lin.
Yang’s “Liquid Votive — Tree Shade Triad,” her tallest set up up to now, rises as a 24-meter-tall “tree” suspended the wrong way up. Working along with her signature venetian blinds, together with LED tubes and laser gentle, she reimagines sacred timber lengthy revered throughout Asia as communal guardians. Close by, Lin’s floral-patterned “Processed” unfolds throughout the flat roofs of two cylindrical “glass bubbles” within the foyer.
Set up view of “A Name of All Beings: See You Tomorrow, Identical Time, Identical Place” / Courtesy of Taichung Artwork Museum
Along with these two large-scale commissions, guests are greeted by the opening exhibition, “A Name of All Beings: See You Tomorrow, Identical Time, Identical Place.”
That includes works by greater than 70 artists from over 20 international locations, the present attracts on the museum’s assortment and an array of newly commissioned items. Collectively, they hint how relationships between people and nature have been imagined and reshaped over time, in dialogue with the museum’s personal pure, city and historic environment.
The presentation strikes fluidly throughout generations. Works by Twentieth-century masters of central Taiwan equivalent to Chen Ting-Shih and Wang Ching-Shuang, which quietly look at human-nature entanglements, are proven alongside modern installations that reach these inquiries into new kinds. Amongst them is Chen Yin-Ju’s “Evocative of Mountains and Seas,” an immersive reconstruction of legendary creatures recorded in a 2,000-year-old Chinese language bestiary. Guests transfer via a sensorial panorama of sound, scent and softly illuminated textual content, as historic imagery is translated into a recent, embodied expertise.
Set up view of “A Name of All Beings” / Courtesy of Taichung Artwork Museum
Set up view of “A Name of All Beings” / Courtesy of Taichung Artwork Museum
Items by worldwide artists additional unsettle fastened distinctions between the human and the pure. Joan Jonas’ bamboo paper kites hover in house, their fragility animated by air. Adrien Tirtiaux’s “Submit-Museum Evidences (the Drill)” disrupts the galleries rather more forcefully: an enormous drill pierces a hallway and two exhibition rooms, exposing the layers of concrete, insulation and metal beneath the museum’s surfaces. The constructing itself thus turns into a part of the work, its supplies become a register of reminiscence.
Accessibility and incapacity are additionally central considerations of the exhibition. Korean artist Seung Hyun Moon’s “On Skinny and Clear Issues” is a video efficiency made throughout the museum’s development, by which three performers, together with Moon himself, transfer slowly via unfinished galleries. Born with cerebral palsy, Moon attracts on his personal expertise of navigating areas not designed with disabled our bodies in thoughts. Amid mud and scaffolding, the three hint delicate waves and vibrations, expressing how human our bodies work together with structure in flux.
A nonetheless from Moon Seung-hyun’s “On Skinny and Clear Issues” (2025) / Courtesy of the artist
Alongside these items is an archival show of images of American creator and incapacity rights advocate Helen Keller, in addition to early unique sketches for Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince” — a narrative usually learn as an allegory of alienation and other ways of being on this planet.
“A Name of All Beings,” which opened on Saturday, runs via April 12, 2026.
